Earthquake

“Freedom is undoubtedly one of the most ambiguous and polysemic words for our political lexicon,” Enzo Traverso tells us in his rewarding and expansive book Revolution: An Intellectual History:

Everybody utters it, but nobody gives it the same meaning. Since the time of Enlightenment, freedom is an almost universally accepted ideal, but its definitions are highly diverse — in many cases incompatible — and its conceptual field is full of paradoxes.

The semiotic dexterity of the word “freedom” allows it to fit into the contradictory political visions of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Benito Mussolini and Leon Trotsky, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek.

Marx believed that “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.” However, the neoliberal economist and public intellectual Milton Friedman argued in 1979 that “a society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

With Friedman’s assertion as a guiding mantra, neoliberalism was supposed to be the apex of freedom. Yet as Wendy Brown has reminded us, “the neoliberal revolution takes place in the name of freedom — free markets, free countries, free men — but tears up freedom’s grounding in sovereignty for states and subjects alike.”

Revolutions are about freedom — freedom from monarchism, authoritarianism, colonialism, capitalism. But the freedoms they institute are never quite as clearcut as they seemed prior to and during the revolutionary moment. The emancipatory freedom of revolution can ultimately manifest in terror. And this is perhaps the great gift of Traverso’s history of revolution: its ability to capture the ambiguity of freedom in the revolutionary moment, to keep open revolution’s potential for both emancipation and terror without denigrating the concept of revolution itself.

But precisely because revolution is about freedom — a slippery and paradoxical concept — a definition of revolution is difficult to pin down. For one thing, revolution can take various forms: political, social, or cultural. Traverso focuses squarely on political revolutions, which enter the world like “an earthquake that human beings live and embody collectively, that individual personalities can, to a greater or lesser extent, influence and direct.” They are “intensely lived” and “display a quantity of energies, passions, affects and feelings much higher than the spiritual standard of ordinary life.”

Throughout the book, revolutions appear almost as a kind of secular providence, sublime or even abominable; they are elevated experiences of human life. However, Traverso is also keen to avoid the association of revolutions with sheer spontaneity, and regularly reminds the reader that revolutions are “conscious accomplishments” brought about by “conscious subjects.” Revolutions are both thought and lived, organized and spontaneous.

Locomotives and Brakes

At their core, revolutions are about history. They are, Traverso argues, “history breathing in and out.” In this respect, they also influence the practice of writing history. Taking its methodological impetus from Marx and Walter Benjamin, and its narratological inspiration from Trotsky, Revolution “aims at rehabilitating the concept of revolution as an interpretive key to modern history.”

To do so, Traverso’s book criticizes the teleological version of history that appears in the schema of classical Marxism, where history unfolds in a natural and linear progression as a result of the clash between processes of production and property relations. According to Traverso, this belief that revolutions “belong to the regular and cumulative time of historical progression was one of the biggest misapprehensions of twentieth-century left-wing culture, too often burdened with the legacy of evolutionism and the idea of Progress.”

The specter of 1989 looms large here. Not only did the teleological view of history seemingly end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Traverso implies, but so did the very idea of revolution. Against the linear and progressive vision of history, Traverso charts an alternative version of history and revolution in Marx’s work, one which places less emphasis on economic determinism and more on political agency and the capacity of human beings to bend history to their own will.

We can find this aversion to the linearity of history reflected in the structure of the book, which eschews the chronological approach to historiography in favor of a thematic framework. For the most part, this creates a delightfully kaleidoscopic reading experience, showcasing Traverso’s enviable skill as a writer and his seamless ability to link revolutionary events across geographical and temporal space. Indeed, the subtitle “an intellectual history” does a disservice to the theoretical breadth and analytical scope of the book. While European revolutions are the fulcrum of his narrative, the thematic approach enables Traverso to draw innovative linkages between revolutionary traditions in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia.

Traverso’s opening chapter discusses trains and railways as both metaphors for and material realities of revolutions. It offers an excellent example of the narratological potential of the thematic approach to the topic of revolutions. In Traverso’s reading, we see how this new mode of transport shaped the revolutionary imagination of the mid- to late nineteenth century, but also how it was fundamental to the execution of both the Russian and Mexican revolutions.

Yet trains and railways also serve as the prism through which to think about the wider theoretical relationship between revolution and history. Traverso bookends the chapter with contrasting understandings of this relationship, juxtaposing Marx’s claim in The Class Struggles in France (1850) that “revolutions are the locomotives of history” with Benjamin’s retort — in a supplement to his famous essay “On the Concept of History” (1942) — that revolutions are in fact an attempt “to activate the emergency brake.”

On the one hand, the railway might symbolize linearity and progress. On the other hand, it also enables human beings to move from one place to another and connects disparate people and groups in ways that might change the direction of history.

Revolution as Totality

Revolution also contains inventive and illuminating chapters on bodies — both physical and metaphorical — and the role of the concepts and symbols of revolutions in shaping memory in the present. While such chapters encapsulate the benefits of the thematic approach, enabling the reader to think through history conceptually rather than chronologically, the lengthy chapter on revolutionary intellectuals demonstrates its pitfalls.

This section buries the excitement and unpredictability of the conceptual approach to historiography in a wide-ranging taxonomy of intellectuals, culminating in a series of tables that detail their education, ascents to power, imprisonment, and death. Although this dataset might be helpful for some historians, the chapter itself feels out of place in the book’s structure and interrupts what had been a captivating narrative to this point.

The final chapter, however, is indispensable reading for any historian of communism in the twentieth century. For Traverso, the debated legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution places twentieth-century historiography between two poles: October 1917 as the “iconic image of utopian aspirations” and as the “embodiment of the totalitarian potentialities of modernity.” The disintegration of the Soviet Union made the second of these positions much more dominant.

Traverso argues that if we are to learn anything from communism in the twentieth century, then we must examine it as a “dialectical totality,” which encompasses both its utopian and totalitarian aspects:

Historicizing communism means inscribing it into a “gigantic adventure” as old as capitalism itself. Communism was a chameleon that could not be isolated as an insular experience or separated from its precursors and heirs.

In other words, the achievements and crimes of communism cannot be separated, because they form part of its internal logic.

More interestingly, perhaps, Traverso also maps the fundamental role of communism in shaping capitalism and checking its worst excesses in the mid-twentieth century. The postwar welfare state could only occur, he contends, because the USSR existed. This conclusion again places great emphasis on 1989 as the “end of history,” to borrow Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase, where capitalism uncovered its “savage face, rediscovered the élan of its heroic times and dismantled the welfare state everywhere.” Without communism, the social democratic left embraced neoliberalism, Traverso argues.

The collapse of the Soviet Union unquestionably provided capitalism with unwarranted legitimacy, and the rise of the “Third Way Left,” embodied in figures such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, appears to confirm Traverso’s argument. However, his conclusion distorts the intellectual, institutional, and political history of neoliberalism, which can be located much earlier than 1989, even on the Left.

The overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Chilean socialist government in 1973 was effectively the beginning of neoliberalism as a political project. By 1989, Ronald Reagan had come and gone and Margaret Thatcher was coming to the end of her tenure; their governments had already started to dismantle the welfare state in the United States and UK by the time the Berlin Wall was demolished.

Furthermore, governments formed by social democratic parties had put a kind of “left-wing neoliberalism” into effect in Australia and New Zealand during the 1980s, several years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Social democracy had also turned neoliberal before 1989.

Unlocking the Future

How might a more engaged and critical understanding of the history of revolution help us shape a future on the Left that avoids a descent into left-wing neoliberalism or the like? After all, as Traverso writes, revolutions “rescue the past by inventing the future.” As the onward march of capitalist progress leads us headfirst into climate catastrophe, how might we reach for the emergency brake? If revolution can be an “interpretive key to modern history,” as Traverso suggests, then how might this key help unlock the future?

Revolution avoids answering such questions: this observation is not a criticism, given that a historian cannot do the work of the past, present, and future all at once. However, the author does criticize the contemporary left (or post-1989 left) with considerable justification. He notes that the “new anti-capitalist movements of recent years do not resonate with any of the left traditions of the past. They lack a genealogy.”

This is certainly true of movements such as Occupy Wall Street, which often sold itself as an alternative version of anti-capitalism in contrast to the hierarchical image of twentieth-century communism. But it is less true in the case of the 2019 uprisings in Chile, which Traverso lists as one of the movements lacking a genealogy. It was impossible to divorce the events in 2019 from 1973 and its aftermath, given that the violent overthrow of Allende marked the beginning of the neoliberal era in Chile that these protesters sought to overthrow. This was history breathing in and out, and the movement invented a new future in the process.

Some minor criticisms notwithstanding, Revolution is a monumental achievement and an example of the exhilarating capacity of inventive historiography. If we are to rehabilitate revolution, to face its troubled history head-on in an attempt to imagine and build a future beyond capitalism, then Traverso’s book is a good starting point.

It doesn’t trivialize or sugarcoat the monstrous potentialities of revolution. But crucially, nor does it bury revolution in the crypts of history. Instead, it asks us to confront history and to reckon with it. If we are to invent the future, then we have to start in the past.